A job management apparatus that systematically activates various types of jobs, such as batch processing or system automatic operation processing, on various kinds of business servers is known. In this job management apparatus, after previously statically defining the job and the execution attributes thereof, a defined job can be activated in response to, for example, an occurrence of event, such as arrival of a given time, notification of a preceding process completion, or the like, and a activating instruction provided by an users operation of a graphical user interface (GUI) or the like. Furthermore, for the command for a job to be activated, a technique to apply an argument from the outside has been proposed, as disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 11-170667.
Incidentally, as an operation of the various types of business servers, for example for system maintenance, changing of the execution host for the job and changing of the output of the job result file are performed. In the conventionally proposed technique, it is possible to apply the argument of the command from the outside, however it is not possible to change the execution attributes that prescribes how to execute the job under which conditions. Therefore when system maintenance is performed, it is necessary to temporarily change the statically defined job, so that the workload might be large, and also there is concern that a human mistake such as a definition error might be introduced.